Believe it or not, George Will is still among the saner of the right's pundits, despite him often publishing turds.

Seriously, folks - when guys like George Will and Pat Buchanan are your intellectual titans, maybe it's time for a little reflection on exactly where everything went horribly wrong. Probably that moment you all decided that pandering to retards was your best shot at success.

Except that the examples he gives are actually examples of laws that work, making these kinds of mass shootings the exception not the rule. Shootings like this are incredibly RARE in those countries. In the USA, they are commonplace and occur several times a year.

Firstly, he doesn't use facts or statistics, he just names single data points of violent crime in higher gun control countries. As anyone who thinks can tell you, prevention != elimination, so his anecdotes mean nothing, statistically.

Secondly, trying to isolate a correlation between gun control and gun violence is so difficult, because there are so many complicating factors: homogeneity of the populace, poverty levels, education levels, heck, even latitude plays a factor (depression in the dark months is more extreme where the change in daylight is more extreme). There's no clean sample. Also, isolating by state gun laws doesn't necessarily help, because in the states inter-state mobility is so easy that you'd have to figure out if the guns were bought in the restrictive state, if the culprit was born and raised in the state in which the crime occurred, etc. I just don't think there has been a convincing enough study done to persuade anybody of anything, either way.

Kimothy:Except that the examples he gives are actually examples of laws that work, making these kinds of mass shootings the exception not the rule. Shootings like this are incredibly RARE in those countries. In the USA, they are commonplace and occur several times a year.

Gosh, I guess it's crazy to suggest that mass shootings in countries with strict gun laws are rare for a reason.

Since all guns were bought legally, no assault weapons were used, and this was an issue of bad parenting and poor mental health treatment using the murder of children to gain an assault weapons ban would be politicizing their deaths. If the goal is to end these types of acts then taking guns away from people nor giving guns to people will solve the problem.

dickfreckle:Believe it or not, George Will is still among the saner of the right's pundits, despite him often publishing turds.

Seriously, folks - when guys like George Will and Pat Buchanan are your intellectual titans, maybe it's time for a little reflection on exactly where everything went horribly wrong. Probably that moment you all decided that pandering to retards was your best shot at success.

The difference between George Will and other right-wing pundits is that George Will's pieces are like long, thick, coiling turds. They come out exactly the way they're supposed to. His fellow pundits shoot out diarrhea and greenish-blue pebbles and the readers eat that up.

FTFA:"Remember, we did have a ban on assault weapons," Will said. "When we put the ban in place, these incidents did not really decline in a measurable way, and when we took it off, they did not increase in a measurable way."

Sock Ruh Tease:dickfreckle: Believe it or not, George Will is still among the saner of the right's pundits, despite him often publishing turds.

Seriously, folks - when guys like George Will and Pat Buchanan are your intellectual titans, maybe it's time for a little reflection on exactly where everything went horribly wrong. Probably that moment you all decided that pandering to retards was your best shot at success.

The difference between George Will and other right-wing pundits is that George Will's pieces are like long, thick, coiling turds. They come out exactly the way they're supposed to. His fellow pundits shoot out diarrhea and greenish-blue pebbles and the readers eat that up.

ghare:Pokey.Clyde: ghare: 20 dead 6-and-7-year-olds say George Will is full of shiat.

And I say you are full of shiat. Just what kind of laws would have stopped that dumbass from killing his mother and stealing guns from her?

Yes, sweetie, everyone having lots of guns is good. We can't do aaaannnnyyyything about it.

I'm convainced, the Tree of Liberty needed those 20 children sacrificed so you can feel like a big man and protect yourself against King George III.

You know what? They won. This is the reality they wanted. It's up to them to find a way to fix it.

So, there we are. The NRA needs to return to it's roots in the 70's when they thought keeping weapons away from people wasn't the most evil thing possible. The rest of us will just hit the dirt while you guys sort it out amongst yourselves.

Outrageous Muff:Since all guns were bought legally, no assault weapons were used, and this was an issue of bad parenting and poor mental health treatment using the murder of children to gain an assault weapons ban would be politicizing their deaths. If the goal is to end these types of acts then taking guns away from people nor giving guns to people will solve the problem.

"As new details emerge, the scope of the horror expands. Lanza apparently sprayed two classrooms at the school with relentless fire from a semi-automatic assault rifle.

It was a massacre, and most of the victims were first-graders. Autopsies on the bodies of the children reveal that many, if not all, had been shot multiple times.

"I only did seven of the autopsies," medical examiner Wayne Carver said. "The victims I had ranged from three to 11 wounds a piece, and I only saw two of them with close-range shooting.""

Bushmaster AR15 .223, BTW which is what... civilian, semi-auto version of the M16?

Here's a guy who did not have access to guns, who went for the next best thing available, and the result was... zero deaths. Nada. Not a one. Did he send twenty-off kids to the hospital? Absolutely. But if you want to put twenty-odd kids in the morgue, you really need a gun.

Got a real link? I'll read George Will. I won't read anything posted on the Daily Caller. I made the mistake of saying to myself the other day "you know what, maybe I should click again, maybe the last time was a fluke" only to find an article that used a 100% objectively false statement as its very first sentence and then based the rest of the article's arguments on that lie.

Also, I'll give a shiat about this argument that stricter controls won't have an effect on gun crime when somebody can explain why the UK has such a lower rate of gun crime since enacting stricter controls. AND explain away the school massacre that led to it since the "clever" resposne is always "IT'S CULTURE!".

Yea, it is. Specifically it's the culture of a bunch of uncultured gun fetishists who think their "right" to shoot small animals and targets with on hand while dipping into a cooler of beer with the other all weekend is so important that they can't even be assed to have a few simple checks and balances placed on them to help keep dangerous weapons out of the hands of deranged lunatics who kill dozens of kids before the cops can even get to the scene.

Remember, any hypothetical gun control legislation must completely eliminate all gun violence to be valid. If it does not, then there's no point in even having any gun control, and we'll just have to live with 30,000 dead and several shooting sprees every year. Even if gun control could significantly reduce that death toll, the fact that there will still be some gun violence means means that it's not worth pursuing.

Since there will always be some criminals who break laws, that means that laws are completely useless, and therefore, we shouldn't even bother having any laws at all.

Jonnadiah:FTFA: "Remember, we did have a ban on assault weapons," Will said. "When we put the ban in place, these incidents did not really decline in a measurable way, and when we took it off, they did not increase in a measurable way."

It's a simple question, are you trying to solve the issue of mass shootings or are you trying to push an agenda? If you agree that you're trying to stop these kinds of acts from happening again then how will banning a weapons or giving out more weapons stop it?

<b><a href="http://www.fark.com/comments/7488829/81320859#c81320859" target="_blank">Jonnadiah</a>:</b> <i>FTFA: "Remember, we did have a ban on assault weapons," Will said. "When we put the ban in place, these incidents did not really decline in a measurable way, and when we took it off, they did not increase in a measurable way."

Prohibiting civilian ownership of a subset of rifles -- which themselves are the least commonly criminally misused class of firearm, being used to commit murder less frequently than unarmed attacks -- is unlikely to impact rates of violent crime.

So because these tragedies occur very rarely in other countries, whose overall homicide rate is a fraction of America's, where mass shootings have become a thing you can expect a few times a year, at least, gun control laws do not work?

Regardless of how you feel about guns, America's homicide rate is an embarrassment. Something needs to be done, most likely at the cultural level. That will take decades. In the meantime, we can have tough, meaningful regulations on gun ownership.